Feel free to look over my résumé, which will list some
writing credits as well as some information on the courses I teach. You
can also look at the course descriptions for the
various courses I teach at Pitt.

In 2012, I chatted with a writer from San Diego City Paper, who included
me in his story about t'ej. In 2013, I shared a few thoughts with a CNN reporter for a story
about African wines. In 2014, a radio journalist for the Canadian
Broadcasting Corp. interviewed me for a piece he did about Ethiopian food
and restaurants in Windsor, Ontario, where he lives and works. And in
2017, I offered some thoughts to The Washington Post about attempts to modernize Ethiopian cuisine.

Finally, to keep writing about Ethiopian food, I've created an Ethiopian food blog, although
as you'll see, it's more journalistic than bloggy. If there's a topic
you'd like me to discuss, or if you have anecdotes to share about the
cuisine, please be in touch.

Before going to work for City Paper, I wrote reviews for 14
years for In Pittsburgh Weekly. On Sept. 26, 2001, City
Paper bought In Pittsburgh Weekly, then closed it and hired
much of its staff. We lost the on-line In Pittsburgh archives in
the process, but I've kept a selection of my reviews on my own web pages,
and you can read them by visiting The Movie
Review Index that I've created. And in The
Movie Feature Index, you can read some of my other writing about the
cinema.

To accompany The
Movie Review Index, I've also put some non-review movie pieces onto my
own web pages. There's Ricky & Me, a
reminiscence about my time as a childhood local TV star (if only for a
day). Or check out an article I wrote on antiquarian bookselling
in Pittsburgh . Or you can read this story from the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette that was written
about me - sort of. I don't do too much news reporting these days, but
when Russian President Dimitry Medvedev visited Pittsburgh in 2009 for the
G-20 summer, I attended his talk and wrote a piece about it.

I have a large collection of works - in
English and 35 foreign languages - by
Gore Vidal, the American novelist/essayist/playwright. The Gore Vidal
Index I've created will tell you all about the author and
every book by and about him,
including the novels he published under various pseudonyms, such as A
Star's Progress by "Katherine Everard," pictured here at right, and
Thieves Fall Out by "Cameron Kay," as well as his commonly known
"Edgar Box" mystery novels. One part of the Index allows you to take a Gore Vidal IQ
Quiz to test your knowledge of the writer's life and work. I also
have a list of Vidal's books in translation
that's part of
The Gore Vidal Index. That's where you'll also find a long interview with Gore
Vidal that I conducted in 1991 when he was in Pittsburgh making a
movie. We talked about politics and literature, his two favorite subjects.
Another link on the Index allows you to see covers from more than 200
of
his books published in translation. Or you can read about the Gores
and the Vidals in politics, which is, you might say, the family business.
Vidal's views on the World Trade Center
attack have been very controversial, so I put together a full link on
those views. And of course, there are those famous debates between Vidal and William F.
Buckley on live TV during the 1968 Democratic national convention in
Chicago.

For the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I've written reviews of
Palimpsest, Vidal's 1995 memoir; The Smithsonian
Institution, his 1998 novel; The Essential Gore Vidal, a
selection of his writings from the past 50 years; Fred Kaplan's biography,
Gore Vidal; and the last novel in Vidal's American Chronicles,
The Golden Age. All of these reviews are collected in The Gore Vidal Index,
which also contains links to other Vidal sites on the web.

As part of
my collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction, I've created
The Pulitzer
Prize Thumbnails Project, where I list each prize-winning work of
fiction and offer my thumbnail commentary on each book, including the most
recent winner, Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer. The Project
also has numerous links to other book prize sites, including the official
pages of the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes.

Another of my scholarly avocations is Ethiopia:
the country, its history and culture, its language, and its food.
In late 2010, I published my book Mesob Across America: Ethiopian
Food in the U.S.A., and to preview it, I've
created a website with a chapter outline and excerpts. I've also
created a guide to Ethiopian restaurants and markets to accompany the
book.

My interest in Ethiopian food began in March 2000, with a meal at an
Ethiopian restaurant. The food was so delicious that I had to learn more
about it. That led to extensive reading on the country, and now I'm
learning to read Amharic, the official language of government in Ethiopia.
I prepare a wide variety of Ethiopian food myself, including Ethiopian honey wine, which is
called t'ej in Amharic (sometimes written t'ej in
English). I call my label Ferenj Tej, and I've created a page to explain and
discuss both my t'ej and t'ej in general. This page
includes instructions for
making t'ej and information on where to find gesho, the fermenting
agent, without which you can't make it. "Ferenj" is the Amharic word for
"foreigner," so the name seemed appropriate. This word is also (with a
slightly different spelling) the name of a race of aliens on Star
Trek: The Next Generation, and the leader of that alien race is
called a "negus," which is the Amharic word for "king."

In May 2004, Pittsburgh got its first Ethiopian restaurant: Abay, located on
Highland Avenue. I
wrote a piece about it for its opening. A pair of writers reviewed the restaurant for City Paper, and
Tony Norman of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazettewrote a
column about the place. Abay was also named best new restaurant in the city in 2005 by the
readers of City Paper. The restaurant's owner closed Abay in
2013. Fortunately, the city by then had a second (and now its only)
Ethiopian restaurant: Tana, which opened in December 2007 on Baum Boulevard,
just around the corner from Abay.

I'm also a long-time hamster-phile, although I
haven't had a hamster for many years now, and probably won't again for
many years to come. My most recent hamster, Brian - seen here eating a
piece of lettuce - was the latest in a long line of hamsters I've owned
during the past 40 years (but none for almost 15 years now). I wrote a
piece about Brian
for my newspaper's 1996 "Tails of the City" Pet Issue, and I've reprinted
it here. Brian passed away in February 1997 at the incredible age of 2
years, 5 months old. The life expectancy of a hamster is about two years.
His final days were hard.

On July 29, 2004, the student leaders of The Pitt News won their
lawsuit against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania when a three-judge panel
of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals declared the state's Act 199 to be
unconstitutional. Act 199 made it illegal for student newspapers in
Pennsylvania to accept any paid advertising for the sale of alcohol, but
the court ruled that such a ban violated the First Amendment guarantee of
a free press. This lawsuit began in 1999 and has gone through numerous
appeals. The Pittsburgh chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union
argued on behalf of the newspaper. You can read the
decision,
in PDF form, on the Court's web site (Adobe Acrobat Reader required).
And here's a link to an
earlier ruling from the Third Circuit court that went against us and
that the court essentially overturned with its July 2004 ruling in our
favor.

I have a roommate here on the web: My friend
(and former student) Anthony Breznican lodged his web page material here
when he graduated from college in 1998. He was with the Associated Press
for six years, then with USA Today for six years. He joined the staff of
Entertainment Weekly
magazine in 2011. He now has lots of his work out there on the web, but
this early work seems to have found a comfortable home where it began. The
pictures here show Anthony as he was in college (left) and as he looks
today.

Anthony's first novel, Brutal Youth, will be published in June 2014.
It's a story of cruelty and survival in a working-class Catholic high
school, and Stephen King has already tweeted his approval of the book.
King said of the book: "If you thought high school was hell, has Anthony
Breznican got a story for you. Every bully who stalked you, every sadistic
teacher who ever terrified you, every stupid prank, every hopeless crush
and false friend: they're all here, along with a few kids who hang
together and try to do the right thing in a brutal environment. By turns
funny and terrifying, Brutal Youth is an unputdownable
tour-de-force, a Rebel Without a Cause for the 21st century."

If you like, you can read the things he wrote for The Associated Press
in Pittsburgh during his internship there during the summer of 1997, or
for The
Pitt News during his year as editor in chief. While working for the
AP, Anthony was shot at by the LA police and bitched at by a noted TV
personality. He now has come to specialize in writing about the movies,
and he regularly covered the Oscars and the Sundance Film Festival for USA
Today, blogging from the scene and writing feature stories. He's flown
around the world for his work, from the Cannes Film Festival, to the set
of Angelina Jolie's directorial debut in Budapest.

Anthony's remembrance and tribute in USA Today to his cat Sinatra got worldwide attention. The
story on the newspaper's website includes a video he made and
photographs by his wife, Jill Breznican.